Raytracing has mostly been replaced with other, faster technologies these days, which produce similar results, so it's not the panacea it seemed back when you had 5-bit hand-drawn stuff OR raytracing.
Those technologies are only faster for the moment. Theoretically, at some point in the future, raytracing will be faster again, and already produces better effects.
It's actually hard to tell which will win, just thinking about it. If I'm reading TFA right, they went from a 20-machine cluster to a single machine in some 4-5 years. And raytracing has better theoretical scalability -- it's embarrassingly parallizable, and has quite a few cases (extremely complex geometry, real curves instead of just triangles, any kind of shaders, hall-of-mirrors effects like Portal) where it outperforms rasterization even on a single machine. Intel's Larrabee is all about exploiting the "embarrassingly parallel" part and simply throwing more CPUs at the problem -- but this is a case where, if you bought two Larrabee cards, you would very likely get double the framerate, just like that.
On the other hand, someone once pointed out that rasterization is still the preferred method in a lot of places in Hollywood, where they do point thousand-machine clusters at the problem of rendering a movie. If true, that would tend to suggest that either these guys are smarter than Hollywood (possible), or that it's going to be a long time before raytracing will beat rasterization on similar hardware.
It's much, much easier for Egypt to simply say "You can't be on the ballot" than to actually go out and arrest all the Muslim Brotherhood members who commit crimes. They just can't do it.
So there's your essential problem...
Again, if Egypt simply says "You can't be on the ballot", well, the crimes will continue.
just like our rights change in times of crises
They shouldn't.
In fact, it's been quite disturbing to watch people forget -- what was the quote? "Those who would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither." Or, of course, "Give me liberty or give me death."
They were under a considerably higher threat -- Britain really should have been able to crush them. And they were also fighting for far fewer rights -- partly freedom of religion, yes, but mostly freedom to not be taxed.
Yet today, an attack on US soil that causes far fewer deaths than automobiles do every year, and suddenly, everyone's ready to give up those rights that our ancestors fought and died for.
So no, I don't believe our rights should change in times of crisis. And in every case that they have, the harm (McCarthyism, Guantanamo, our own Japanese American Internment) has outweighed the good (so how much intelligence did we get from that wiretapping? Is America safe from communism yet?)
I'm not saying I have a solution, only that what you've proposed will not work over the long term, and could easily backfire in the short term -- and that's only considering it in a purely pragmatic way.
I found that manual note taking (even though I am left-handed, and so smeared ink) ingrained the information in my brain better than listening.
I find it depends how I do it.
Mental mapping can be useful in some techniques, but I constantly found myself wishing I had a software tool to do it for me.
When things are, in fact, best represented as a stream of text, I find it's much easier if I can type that quickly and get back to actually listening.
But, YMMV.
All you need is a calculator. The manual act of plotting graphs (even when the point are generated by calculator) seemed to reinforce things for me.
I found it more useful when whole graphs could be generated quickly, and then I could ask questions like, what would it mean if I changed this value? What would have to change for the graph to look like this?
Yes, calculus can solve those, but actually, probably the most valuable precalculus tool was Excel -- they made us generate a few tables, and look for a pattern, and only once we'd done it that way were we allowed to use that formula.
It's closer than you'd think - we're talking about parties that say "We will institute Sharia if elected".
Then, don't let them be elected. Show them, and their followers, why Sharia is wrong.
Don't censor them, and give them an excuse to play the oppressed.
Their ideas are not usually inconsistent - you're not going to poke holes in them.
Sharia? It's swiss cheese. Perhaps it's internally inconsistent, though this is unlikely -- I haven't read a consistent scripture yet. But it's certainly not consistent with reality, and that's easily demonstrated.
Free speech will not solve the problem of separate mental worlds though when people spend from cradle to grave in their own societies and mental worlds completely disjoint from one's own.
Then we are doomed, because free speech and education has a far better chance of working there than trying to shut one of those worlds up.
Unless you are suggesting genocide of your own... Do you really think these parties will stop, if silenced? Or will they find ways to communicate and broadcast anyway, and gain sympathy about how they have been silenced and oppressed?
I believe the position of free speech as an absolute, like other autonomy/liberty-absolutism, is in fact what is simple, neat, and wrong.
A good point -- nonetheless, every case I have ever seen has only reinforced my conclusion that the harm done by censorship is far worse than the harm prevented by censorship.
Reasoning agents who start from different postulates than yours will arrive at different conclusions when presented with the same factual data.
It is not, however, impossible to show that a postulate is false.
some people don't even use reason -- they just think what they're told or what they want to think. You can't educate such people out of their delusions.
For those people, you can appeal to emotion.
That's like allowing the Nazi Party to win office in Germany again.
If Germany actually voted for a Nazi party again, they deserve what they get.
However, I don't think their memories are that short -- even if their government wasn't deliberately trying to avoid it.
Let people have any democratic movement they like that doesn't exterminate minorities or start wars.
So... uh... what does that leave again?
It wasn't that long ago that the US started a war. Are you saying the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) should be excluded, for that reason?
Keep in mind, this is a list of things which I believe to be viable alternatives, not necessarily good ones, and not necessarily better. Just things you might not have known about, or considered.
Mostly, just in case people read TFA, try one of his suggestions, and find themselves thinking "this sucks!" Well, Linux is all about choice -- and here is some choice:
Vanilla SSH is good, but...
To replace SecureCRT I chose SSH Menu along with the stock OpenSSH client. This keeps track of my connections, allowing me to avoid having to memorize IP addresses of jump off boxes, and it also remembers my window sizes.
For the IP addresses, I would suggest a host file and possibly some aliases, if you have a few you connect to often enough to have, for example, 'ssh root@chromium' is too long, so you type something like shcr instead. (I don't actually do that (I type too fast to care), but I've seen others do it.)
Or just use a smarter terminal -- one which can remember window sizes and commands to run as part of a "session".
Also, there's no SCP or SFTP feature that I can find comparable to SecureCRT. This isn't too much of a problem as I don't SCP that many files, but it's still annoying having to type in hostnames or IP addresses.
See above -- not ssh-specific. Any command you type frequently enough, you could just make a menu entry.
Or, if you're a GUI person, fish is nice, too -- just bookmark fish://user@host/wherever in Konqueror.
I'm using OpenOffice (OO) 2.4.1, and it works fine.
Good enough.
If it's not fine, alternatives to try are KOffice, or the GNOME office stuff (AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc). Google Docs, of course, works flawlessly in Firefox regardless of platform.
Ok, Microsoft is probably never going to port this application to Linux. So I used VirtualBox, a free alternative to VMWare, and installed XP.
Not a horrible solution, if you actually need Visio. But there are numerous alternatives that try to do the same thing. I usually go for something more automatic, like GraphViz (with dot).
Since I use Adblock, sometimes I have to use Opera when I want to see how a page is supposed to look.
Or Konqueror... Or you can turn off Adblock for a single page.
This is a sore spot. I work in an Exchange environment...
When I did, I just used Thunderbird with IMAP. These days, I'd use KMail/Kontact with IMAP. I guess it depends how much you need.
The problem is Evolution kind of sucks too
I'll suggest Kontact.
Another easy win here. Pidgin comes pre-installed.
Cool. If you need webcam support, there's Kopete, but it has its own weirdness. Pidgin likely Just Works.
Nothing big here, I just use Gnome-RDP.
Similarly, krdc is nice, mostly because it's a multi-backend client. Paste in a URI-like specification, and it'll do RDP, VNC, whatever.
Ubuntu comes with a stock PDF reader pre-installed, and it works. However it's pretty plain, and at one point I changed it to view two pages at once and since haven't figured out how to put it back.
KPDF was good. Okular is excellent. And for the record, to change the above in Okular is view->view mode.
So I downloaded the Adobe Linux client and it works great.
apt-get install acroread. Yep, works great. I only use it when I have to, though.
So I use PasswordSafe. Unfortunately the Linux version sucks.
There's got to be something else out there. I know that, at one point, I was using Google Browser Sync -- maybe there's a service like that, still?
I just switched over to Amarok though, and I love it - it has smart playlists, and even a pause button! I kept Rythymb
SecureCRT uses tabs in a window for each session you have open. You can open a new tab with a "sftp>" prompt and enter sftp commands
Or you can just use a tabbed terminal, like Gnome-Terminal, Konsole, or pretty much any other, and create a session which just runs the 'sftp' command. If you don't like having to enter a password, use ssh keys.
probably an even bigger issue is the teachers are going to have to focus a lot of their time on working out bugs and learning IT stuff, when they should be focusing on TEACHING.
Like it or not, computers are now tools of their trade, just as they are tools of the accountant, the manager, and the office drone.
Now, certainly, IT should make this as simple as possible, but no simpler.
My first year of college, half of the students played Diablo 2 every class. These students didn't make it to their second year.
Thus implying that the second half of those students had the self-control needed to not play Diablo 2 when given a computer -- they'll probably do much better in the workplace, too, than office drones who play WoW all day.
But seriously, they were very helpful for senior thesis (high school) -- while there was always the distraction of playing Doom while the teacher was out, it did mean that while we were working, we were more productive, both as a research tool (wikipedia isn't bad, just cite it), and for sheer typing speed.
I would say, when studying math for the sake of math, it would certainly be useful to ban computers for much of the curriculum -- even calculators aren't needed. Then, when they start using them, they'll at least have a sense of when the computer is wrong.
For writing, however, I don't see a significant advantage to not providing a computer. All the pen does is make your hand cramp...
And for science, I would say, you already have to do it by hand in math, a computer would be useful in science, if it means you get to cover more ground, faster. But I'm not sure.
These are not western societies where we can take for granted that enough people will be incredibly hostile to the idea of Bible or Quran specifying to great detail the shape of society that that will never happen.
Well, no, we can't take it for granted here, either.
But the steps to prevent it are not censorship and repressing those ideas, because they will only be more powerful when people find them.
The steps to prevent it are education -- if we truly believe these truths to be self-evident, then a well-educated person should be likely to agree with them.
Would you approve of an openly pro-NAMBLA campaign in the US?
Approve of what they're selling? No, absolutely not. But I would approve of their right to try.
How about a church sect that uses the Bible to "prove" the superiority of whites over blacks and wants to use cable public access time to preach their message?
There has been a supreme court case about this -- someone tried to get a show canceled on Kansas City Public Access TV. It was called, "Klansas City Kable."
A little closer to what is going on in Egypt would be if new political party came out with an clearly religious platform that included banning all religions that did not include homosexuals. With the message that by not including homosexuals these other religons were "bad for the country and must be eradicated".
Yep. Go ahead. Still just talking -- I absolutely do not agree with the message, but I'll fight to let it be told.
Burn down a few Catholic churches and Islamic mosques as a symbol of the "new order".
And this is the moment when it becomes not OK. Because this is no longer speech, it's actual vandalism, maybe violence.
Anyone actually doing this should be stopped, and punished.
But that does not remove the right of others, who are not actually burning churches and mosques, to continue spreading their message.
Free speech is messy. The alternative is worse -- your "losing the country to the 12th century" would be, largely, a loss of free speech.
No - disagreement within certain bounds is fine (healthy in most cases).
Who sets those bounds?
There are things that are pretty much outside the realm of democratic deliberation
What things are outside that realm, and how do you decide?
Democracy is a nuanced, often-useful tool. It's not the "one true tool", nor is it our faith.
In fact, it is the worst system of government that has ever been tried, except for all the others. (Apologies to Churchill.)
Read your own sig. Censorship is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. Free speech, even speech you don't like, even "dangerous", disruptive speech, is difficult, messy, and right.
we'd like to have democracy, but if you're pushing these views I don't like, you can't come to the party
Is that really what you want to say?
I agree with you in that I don't like genocide or theocracy either. However, if you truly believe that you cannot argue effectively against them in a world of free speech, I think that says more about the weakness of your own views than about how "dangerous" those views are.
And, indeed, if you're suggesting that views you don't like, or views you consider dangerous, should be silenced, how is that better than a theocracy, in which religions other than the state religion are silenced?
If someone is actually proving to be a danger -- if they are actually participating in genocide (or even a single murder), then yes, we can say they can't come to the party, mostly because we'll lock them away.
But talking about these things is not the same as doing them. Not even close.
You don't get paid (or at least not near as much),
Citation needed. How much does broadcast TV make? How much do YouTube ads make?
you don't get the benefit of getting viewers simply because there's only so many channels people can watch.
True, but that's an inevitability. On TV, you already have several hundred, some places almost a thousand channels. You've also got DVRs, which cable and satellite providers are pretty much giving away with the service.
So, people are getting more choice about what to watch, and when. YouTube is the logical and inevitable end result.
Sure, you can say anyone that makes it on the top whatever list is famous...but how long does that usually last? A week? Maybe a month?
The mob is less predictable than you think.
Leeroy Jenkins. All your base. Penny Arcade. Even Slashdot.
All of these things happened pretty much by just being there, or by word of mouth, or by actually providing a solid product. None of them exactly have commercial support, and none of them really owe their success to TV.
Famous enough to make money off the fame alone? Maybe not. But also very much a part of culture, maybe not a massive hit, but not soon forgotten, either.
I'm expressing this opinion from a user's perspective, not describing the fundamental technologies.
I'm describing both.
The fundamental technology is more secure, which does have a real impact on the user's experience.
And, as a user, I'd much rather check several boxes to install several pieces of software than have to download each individually, double-click, then next-next-next. Similarly, to keep it up to date and running smoothly, I'd much rather just have one place to check for updates, than five auto-updaters and an additional ten or fifteen programs I have to manually go back to the website and check.
It's also nice to save bandwidth and disk space by having common libraries distributed exactly once and then shared. And it's nice from a developer's perspective, because I no longer have to worry too much about reducing my dependencies, or favoring "built-in" libraries (included in the target distro) over uncommon ones.
Here was my general experience:
That does suck, no question. However:
I'm going to assume you actually had a need to do it that way. I've got foo2zjs installed, via the Ubuntu package. I didn't deliberately do so -- I'm assuming it was a dependency, somehow.
Restarting cups is exactly the kind of thing that the package manager handles for you -- never mind that I didn't have to compile from source.
And, it should be possible to either take that set of commands and turn them into a script (literally copy and paste them for others to find), or build a custom package. Conversely, it is much harder if I want to write a script for Windows which installs a particular piece of software a certain way, while uninstalling the previous one, etc -- maybe I just don't know how.
My guess is that Comcast didn't see your community as valuable enough to pursue until there was already strong competition.
Possible... But Mediacom is here.
Lisco, by the way, is the old DSL provider, and they were the old dialup provider. They are a good example, I think, of a company which actually (for the most part) keeps up with the times (their horrible website notwithstanding).
because it is easier to get right of way for the fiber, and you don't inconvenience everyone and their brother by having to rip up street or sidewalks and cause traffic jams in fairfield iowa than it is in say, atlanta georgia?
Actually, you do. Moreover, everyone and their brother knows who you are. Give it a few hours, and the whole town will be talking about what a shoddy job you're doing of ripping things up, or how nice that redecoration on that side of town looks.
Why would tearing up a road in a city be more of a problem than tearing up a road in a small town? If it's a major highway, why wouldn't the city have easier routes for running cables than tearing the whole thing up?
WINE has reached 1.0, but is it really a 1.0 release? Windows 6.1 will be called 7.
In the case of Wine, it's hard to say it will ever actually be a solid release. The only way there'd be a 1.0 worthy of the name would be if Microsoft blessed it with patents and developer time. Even then, it'd be a long, slow process.
I'm quite used to see version-numbers being (ab)used as a marketing tool or just changed for whatever arbitrary reason.
Yes, I'm used to it. However, this is in the world of proprietary software, where I expect marketing to drive things -- also, where when these things happen, I can cry out in anger into a support line.
In open source, I'm much more used to things like Linux 2.6.0 -- I can't remember anything not Just Working, and the majority of things people actually needed were backported to the 2.4 series.
Or, say, Firefox 3.0. A few addons/extensions weren't compatible, most ported very quickly. Long beta period leading up to release, pretty much rock solid on release day, arguably better than 2 in most ways. The kind of problems Firefox had (EULA or no EULA?), while annoying, were nothing compared to the problems KDE4 had (crashes alone on.0 day sucked.)
The problem is, I want stable, I don't want several-year-old stable. And some projects move at different speeds than others.
That is, in fact, what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place -- the promise that there wouldn't be a steady stream of updates that actually change things, and a bunch of random breakage, but rather that every six months, the distro people would bump the versions, work hard to make sure everything's solid, and release.
And this actually seemed to be working well enough, until now.
Sometimes projects have to make tough decisions in order to meet deadlines or to otherwise keep development going in the right direction.... don't think that you could have done any better if you were in their shoes.
I would say, in this case, missing the deadline might have been the better option. Certainly, if this becomes common, so will people leaving for other distros.
It's not like Duke Nukem Forever, or Vista. Pushing it back a few months would not be the end of the world, considering I can't remember an Ubuntu release being late before.
Slashdot Mirror
Raytracing has mostly been replaced with other, faster technologies these days, which produce similar results, so it's not the panacea it seemed back when you had 5-bit hand-drawn stuff OR raytracing.
Those technologies are only faster for the moment. Theoretically, at some point in the future, raytracing will be faster again, and already produces better effects.
It's actually hard to tell which will win, just thinking about it. If I'm reading TFA right, they went from a 20-machine cluster to a single machine in some 4-5 years. And raytracing has better theoretical scalability -- it's embarrassingly parallizable, and has quite a few cases (extremely complex geometry, real curves instead of just triangles, any kind of shaders, hall-of-mirrors effects like Portal) where it outperforms rasterization even on a single machine. Intel's Larrabee is all about exploiting the "embarrassingly parallel" part and simply throwing more CPUs at the problem -- but this is a case where, if you bought two Larrabee cards, you would very likely get double the framerate, just like that.
On the other hand, someone once pointed out that rasterization is still the preferred method in a lot of places in Hollywood, where they do point thousand-machine clusters at the problem of rendering a movie. If true, that would tend to suggest that either these guys are smarter than Hollywood (possible), or that it's going to be a long time before raytracing will beat rasterization on similar hardware.
It's much, much easier for Egypt to simply say "You can't be on the ballot" than to actually go out and arrest all the Muslim Brotherhood members who commit crimes. They just can't do it.
So there's your essential problem...
Again, if Egypt simply says "You can't be on the ballot", well, the crimes will continue.
just like our rights change in times of crises
They shouldn't.
In fact, it's been quite disturbing to watch people forget -- what was the quote? "Those who would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither." Or, of course, "Give me liberty or give me death."
They were under a considerably higher threat -- Britain really should have been able to crush them. And they were also fighting for far fewer rights -- partly freedom of religion, yes, but mostly freedom to not be taxed.
Yet today, an attack on US soil that causes far fewer deaths than automobiles do every year, and suddenly, everyone's ready to give up those rights that our ancestors fought and died for.
So no, I don't believe our rights should change in times of crisis. And in every case that they have, the harm (McCarthyism, Guantanamo, our own Japanese American Internment) has outweighed the good (so how much intelligence did we get from that wiretapping? Is America safe from communism yet?)
I'm not saying I have a solution, only that what you've proposed will not work over the long term, and could easily backfire in the short term -- and that's only considering it in a purely pragmatic way.
I found that manual note taking (even though I am left-handed, and so smeared ink) ingrained the information in my brain better than listening.
I find it depends how I do it.
Mental mapping can be useful in some techniques, but I constantly found myself wishing I had a software tool to do it for me.
When things are, in fact, best represented as a stream of text, I find it's much easier if I can type that quickly and get back to actually listening.
But, YMMV.
All you need is a calculator. The manual act of plotting graphs (even when the point are generated by calculator) seemed to reinforce things for me.
I found it more useful when whole graphs could be generated quickly, and then I could ask questions like, what would it mean if I changed this value? What would have to change for the graph to look like this?
Yes, calculus can solve those, but actually, probably the most valuable precalculus tool was Excel -- they made us generate a few tables, and look for a pattern, and only once we'd done it that way were we allowed to use that formula.
It's closer than you'd think - we're talking about parties that say "We will institute Sharia if elected".
Then, don't let them be elected. Show them, and their followers, why Sharia is wrong.
Don't censor them, and give them an excuse to play the oppressed.
Their ideas are not usually inconsistent - you're not going to poke holes in them.
Sharia? It's swiss cheese. Perhaps it's internally inconsistent, though this is unlikely -- I haven't read a consistent scripture yet. But it's certainly not consistent with reality, and that's easily demonstrated.
Free speech will not solve the problem of separate mental worlds though when people spend from cradle to grave in their own societies and mental worlds completely disjoint from one's own.
Then we are doomed, because free speech and education has a far better chance of working there than trying to shut one of those worlds up.
Unless you are suggesting genocide of your own... Do you really think these parties will stop, if silenced? Or will they find ways to communicate and broadcast anyway, and gain sympathy about how they have been silenced and oppressed?
In some circumstances it is appropriate
What determines when it's appropriate?
I believe the position of free speech as an absolute, like other autonomy/liberty-absolutism, is in fact what is simple, neat, and wrong.
A good point -- nonetheless, every case I have ever seen has only reinforced my conclusion that the harm done by censorship is far worse than the harm prevented by censorship.
Reasoning agents who start from different postulates than yours will arrive at different conclusions when presented with the same factual data.
It is not, however, impossible to show that a postulate is false.
some people don't even use reason -- they just think what they're told or what they want to think. You can't educate such people out of their delusions.
For those people, you can appeal to emotion.
That's like allowing the Nazi Party to win office in Germany again.
If Germany actually voted for a Nazi party again, they deserve what they get.
However, I don't think their memories are that short -- even if their government wasn't deliberately trying to avoid it.
Let people have any democratic movement they like that doesn't exterminate minorities or start wars.
So... uh... what does that leave again?
It wasn't that long ago that the US started a war. Are you saying the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) should be excluded, for that reason?
Keep in mind, this is a list of things which I believe to be viable alternatives, not necessarily good ones, and not necessarily better. Just things you might not have known about, or considered.
Mostly, just in case people read TFA, try one of his suggestions, and find themselves thinking "this sucks!" Well, Linux is all about choice -- and here is some choice:
Vanilla SSH is good, but...
To replace SecureCRT I chose SSH Menu along with the stock OpenSSH client. This keeps track of my connections, allowing me to avoid having to memorize IP addresses of jump off boxes, and it also remembers my window sizes.
For the IP addresses, I would suggest a host file and possibly some aliases, if you have a few you connect to often enough to have, for example, 'ssh root@chromium' is too long, so you type something like shcr instead. (I don't actually do that (I type too fast to care), but I've seen others do it.)
Or just use a smarter terminal -- one which can remember window sizes and commands to run as part of a "session".
Also, there's no SCP or SFTP feature that I can find comparable to SecureCRT. This isn't too much of a problem as I don't SCP that many files, but it's still annoying having to type in hostnames or IP addresses.
See above -- not ssh-specific. Any command you type frequently enough, you could just make a menu entry.
Or, if you're a GUI person, fish is nice, too -- just bookmark fish://user@host/wherever in Konqueror.
I'm using OpenOffice (OO) 2.4.1, and it works fine.
Good enough.
If it's not fine, alternatives to try are KOffice, or the GNOME office stuff (AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc). Google Docs, of course, works flawlessly in Firefox regardless of platform.
Ok, Microsoft is probably never going to port this application to Linux. So I used VirtualBox, a free alternative to VMWare, and installed XP.
Not a horrible solution, if you actually need Visio. But there are numerous alternatives that try to do the same thing. I usually go for something more automatic, like GraphViz (with dot).
Since I use Adblock, sometimes I have to use Opera when I want to see how a page is supposed to look.
Or Konqueror... Or you can turn off Adblock for a single page.
This is a sore spot. I work in an Exchange environment...
When I did, I just used Thunderbird with IMAP. These days, I'd use KMail/Kontact with IMAP. I guess it depends how much you need.
The problem is Evolution kind of sucks too
I'll suggest Kontact.
Another easy win here. Pidgin comes pre-installed.
Cool. If you need webcam support, there's Kopete, but it has its own weirdness. Pidgin likely Just Works.
Nothing big here, I just use Gnome-RDP.
Similarly, krdc is nice, mostly because it's a multi-backend client. Paste in a URI-like specification, and it'll do RDP, VNC, whatever.
Ubuntu comes with a stock PDF reader pre-installed, and it works. However it's pretty plain, and at one point I changed it to view two pages at once and since haven't figured out how to put it back.
KPDF was good. Okular is excellent. And for the record, to change the above in Okular is view->view mode.
So I downloaded the Adobe Linux client and it works great.
apt-get install acroread. Yep, works great. I only use it when I have to, though.
So I use PasswordSafe. Unfortunately the Linux version sucks.
There's got to be something else out there. I know that, at one point, I was using Google Browser Sync -- maybe there's a service like that, still?
I just switched over to Amarok though, and I love it - it has smart playlists, and even a pause button! I kept Rythymb
Depends what you truly need Visio for. For most things I want to graph, I use GraphViz, often Dot, or I just grab a whiteboard.
SecureCRT uses tabs in a window for each session you have open. You can open a new tab with a "sftp>" prompt and enter sftp commands
Or you can just use a tabbed terminal, like Gnome-Terminal, Konsole, or pretty much any other, and create a session which just runs the 'sftp' command. If you don't like having to enter a password, use ssh keys.
probably an even bigger issue is the teachers are going to have to focus a lot of their time on working out bugs and learning IT stuff, when they should be focusing on TEACHING.
Like it or not, computers are now tools of their trade, just as they are tools of the accountant, the manager, and the office drone.
Now, certainly, IT should make this as simple as possible, but no simpler.
My first year of college, half of the students played Diablo 2 every class. These students didn't make it to their second year.
Thus implying that the second half of those students had the self-control needed to not play Diablo 2 when given a computer -- they'll probably do much better in the workplace, too, than office drones who play WoW all day.
Surely this can be mitigated by giving them official school sleds? Or by suggesting, in the student handbook, that they use cafeteria trays instead?
Computers in the classroom add nothing.
If it's computer science, they add quite a bit...
But seriously, they were very helpful for senior thesis (high school) -- while there was always the distraction of playing Doom while the teacher was out, it did mean that while we were working, we were more productive, both as a research tool (wikipedia isn't bad, just cite it), and for sheer typing speed.
I would say, when studying math for the sake of math, it would certainly be useful to ban computers for much of the curriculum -- even calculators aren't needed. Then, when they start using them, they'll at least have a sense of when the computer is wrong.
For writing, however, I don't see a significant advantage to not providing a computer. All the pen does is make your hand cramp...
And for science, I would say, you already have to do it by hand in math, a computer would be useful in science, if it means you get to cover more ground, faster. But I'm not sure.
These are not western societies where we can take for granted that enough people will be incredibly hostile to the idea of Bible or Quran specifying to great detail the shape of society that that will never happen.
Well, no, we can't take it for granted here, either.
But the steps to prevent it are not censorship and repressing those ideas, because they will only be more powerful when people find them.
The steps to prevent it are education -- if we truly believe these truths to be self-evident, then a well-educated person should be likely to agree with them.
Would you approve of an openly pro-NAMBLA campaign in the US?
Approve of what they're selling? No, absolutely not. But I would approve of their right to try.
How about a church sect that uses the Bible to "prove" the superiority of whites over blacks and wants to use cable public access time to preach their message?
There has been a supreme court case about this -- someone tried to get a show canceled on Kansas City Public Access TV. It was called, "Klansas City Kable."
A little closer to what is going on in Egypt would be if new political party came out with an clearly religious platform that included banning all religions that did not include homosexuals. With the message that by not including homosexuals these other religons were "bad for the country and must be eradicated".
Yep. Go ahead. Still just talking -- I absolutely do not agree with the message, but I'll fight to let it be told.
Burn down a few Catholic churches and Islamic mosques as a symbol of the "new order".
And this is the moment when it becomes not OK. Because this is no longer speech, it's actual vandalism, maybe violence.
Anyone actually doing this should be stopped, and punished.
But that does not remove the right of others, who are not actually burning churches and mosques, to continue spreading their message.
Free speech is messy. The alternative is worse -- your "losing the country to the 12th century" would be, largely, a loss of free speech.
anyone intending to create religious rule should be disqualified from being elected.
Good idea.
And while we're at it, let's ban anyone intending to restrict gay marriage. Or should we ban anyone intending to promote gay marriage?
And we should ban people who support torture, or the death penalty.
And maybe people who support raising taxes on the poor. After all, the poor need that money -- it would be torture to tax them...
I've got it! How about we ban people who want to destroy our core rights? Rights like freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of the press...
Sorry, you're disqualified from being elected. Depending on which of your posts I'm reading, perhaps you're disqualified from speaking, too.
No - disagreement within certain bounds is fine (healthy in most cases).
Who sets those bounds?
There are things that are pretty much outside the realm of democratic deliberation
What things are outside that realm, and how do you decide?
Democracy is a nuanced, often-useful tool. It's not the "one true tool", nor is it our faith.
In fact, it is the worst system of government that has ever been tried, except for all the others. (Apologies to Churchill.)
Read your own sig. Censorship is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. Free speech, even speech you don't like, even "dangerous", disruptive speech, is difficult, messy, and right.
we'd like to have democracy, but if you're pushing these views I don't like, you can't come to the party
Is that really what you want to say?
I agree with you in that I don't like genocide or theocracy either. However, if you truly believe that you cannot argue effectively against them in a world of free speech, I think that says more about the weakness of your own views than about how "dangerous" those views are.
And, indeed, if you're suggesting that views you don't like, or views you consider dangerous, should be silenced, how is that better than a theocracy, in which religions other than the state religion are silenced?
If someone is actually proving to be a danger -- if they are actually participating in genocide (or even a single murder), then yes, we can say they can't come to the party, mostly because we'll lock them away.
But talking about these things is not the same as doing them. Not even close.
You don't get paid (or at least not near as much),
Citation needed. How much does broadcast TV make? How much do YouTube ads make?
you don't get the benefit of getting viewers simply because there's only so many channels people can watch.
True, but that's an inevitability. On TV, you already have several hundred, some places almost a thousand channels. You've also got DVRs, which cable and satellite providers are pretty much giving away with the service.
So, people are getting more choice about what to watch, and when. YouTube is the logical and inevitable end result.
Sure, you can say anyone that makes it on the top whatever list is famous...but how long does that usually last? A week? Maybe a month?
The mob is less predictable than you think.
Leeroy Jenkins. All your base. Penny Arcade. Even Slashdot.
All of these things happened pretty much by just being there, or by word of mouth, or by actually providing a solid product. None of them exactly have commercial support, and none of them really owe their success to TV.
Famous enough to make money off the fame alone? Maybe not. But also very much a part of culture, maybe not a massive hit, but not soon forgotten, either.
I'm expressing this opinion from a user's perspective, not describing the fundamental technologies.
I'm describing both.
The fundamental technology is more secure, which does have a real impact on the user's experience.
And, as a user, I'd much rather check several boxes to install several pieces of software than have to download each individually, double-click, then next-next-next. Similarly, to keep it up to date and running smoothly, I'd much rather just have one place to check for updates, than five auto-updaters and an additional ten or fifteen programs I have to manually go back to the website and check.
It's also nice to save bandwidth and disk space by having common libraries distributed exactly once and then shared. And it's nice from a developer's perspective, because I no longer have to worry too much about reducing my dependencies, or favoring "built-in" libraries (included in the target distro) over uncommon ones.
Here was my general experience:
That does suck, no question. However:
I'm going to assume you actually had a need to do it that way. I've got foo2zjs installed, via the Ubuntu package. I didn't deliberately do so -- I'm assuming it was a dependency, somehow.
Restarting cups is exactly the kind of thing that the package manager handles for you -- never mind that I didn't have to compile from source.
And, it should be possible to either take that set of commands and turn them into a script (literally copy and paste them for others to find), or build a custom package. Conversely, it is much harder if I want to write a script for Windows which installs a particular piece of software a certain way, while uninstalling the previous one, etc -- maybe I just don't know how.
My guess is that Comcast didn't see your community as valuable enough to pursue until there was already strong competition.
Possible... But Mediacom is here.
Lisco, by the way, is the old DSL provider, and they were the old dialup provider. They are a good example, I think, of a company which actually (for the most part) keeps up with the times (their horrible website notwithstanding).
because it is easier to get right of way for the fiber, and you don't inconvenience everyone and their brother by having to rip up street or sidewalks and cause traffic jams in fairfield iowa than it is in say, atlanta georgia?
Actually, you do. Moreover, everyone and their brother knows who you are. Give it a few hours, and the whole town will be talking about what a shoddy job you're doing of ripping things up, or how nice that redecoration on that side of town looks.
Why would tearing up a road in a city be more of a problem than tearing up a road in a small town? If it's a major highway, why wouldn't the city have easier routes for running cables than tearing the whole thing up?
WINE has reached 1.0, but is it really a 1.0 release? Windows 6.1 will be called 7.
In the case of Wine, it's hard to say it will ever actually be a solid release. The only way there'd be a 1.0 worthy of the name would be if Microsoft blessed it with patents and developer time. Even then, it'd be a long, slow process.
I'm quite used to see version-numbers being (ab)used as a marketing tool or just changed for whatever arbitrary reason.
Yes, I'm used to it. However, this is in the world of proprietary software, where I expect marketing to drive things -- also, where when these things happen, I can cry out in anger into a support line.
In open source, I'm much more used to things like Linux 2.6.0 -- I can't remember anything not Just Working, and the majority of things people actually needed were backported to the 2.4 series.
Or, say, Firefox 3.0. A few addons/extensions weren't compatible, most ported very quickly. Long beta period leading up to release, pretty much rock solid on release day, arguably better than 2 in most ways. The kind of problems Firefox had (EULA or no EULA?), while annoying, were nothing compared to the problems KDE4 had (crashes alone on .0 day sucked.)
The problem is, I want stable, I don't want several-year-old stable. And some projects move at different speeds than others.
That is, in fact, what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place -- the promise that there wouldn't be a steady stream of updates that actually change things, and a bunch of random breakage, but rather that every six months, the distro people would bump the versions, work hard to make sure everything's solid, and release.
And this actually seemed to be working well enough, until now.
Sometimes projects have to make tough decisions in order to meet deadlines or to otherwise keep development going in the right direction.... don't think that you could have done any better if you were in their shoes.
I would say, in this case, missing the deadline might have been the better option. Certainly, if this becomes common, so will people leaving for other distros.
It's not like Duke Nukem Forever, or Vista. Pushing it back a few months would not be the end of the world, considering I can't remember an Ubuntu release being late before.